Urban Planning is a great metaphor for thinking about planning work and life.

When I first started doing big transformation programs—for work and for life—I had this idea of perfectibility, that everything could and should be optimized.  That was pretty naive, I suppose.  The implicit model was like thinking you could build a house so perfect that when you moved in, there would be nothing you’d want to change.

Big complex systems have a lot in common with cities:  different constituencies, trade-offs, big constraints.  You generally won’t say for example, we’ll move that river, because it’s in an inconvenient spot, is interfering with traffic, etc.  (Although Chicago famously reversed the flow of its eponymous river, so nothing’s off the table on some level.)

Leadership for Urban Planning tackles strategic questions like improving quality of life or improving the local and surrounding economies, attracting new residents, or new businesses.  It contemplates and plans how to do all this within the web of constituencies, trade-offs, and big constraints.  Leave the river.   We need to find another, holistic solution.  It takes its own personality—or culture, if you like—strongly into account.

I find this a useful way to think about both business and personal transformations.  We don’t need to think of ourselves, or our organizations, as broken things that need to be “fixed.”  Rather, let’s look on ourselves and our organizations more generously as a dynamic, complex ecosystem with a personality that we would like to evolve to higher forms.

When I plan and execute for myself in a balanced and energetic way, I can evolve in multiple important categories at once. For example, at the moment I’ve undertaken a major new piece of work that has a lot of intellectual content and where I am meeting a lot of new friends and colleagues.  So I’ve dialed back a bit on some of the intellectual/learning I had been doing in other areas the past several months.  This can be true of organizational change as well, if we approach it with this kind of Systems Thinking.

It’s a great feeling to do good work along multiple dimensions at once!  Recommended.

-Chris